Ric Martini:
Author transcends time zones, continents with his textbooks

Over the last decade, award-winning author Ric Martini has experienced the textbook publishing process shifting electronically and multi-nationally. “At one point I had a compositor in Italy; keystroking/coding was done in India; the illustration team was in Virginia; I was in Hawaii or New Zealand; the publishing group was in San Francisco; the publishing headquarters was in New Jersey; and the corporate chiefs were in London,” Martini said. “Talk about time zone problems. Just try scheduling a conference call.”

Yet despite the wide distances with his team at times, his list of textbooks has grown, including the eighth edition of his first textbook, Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology (2008). The newest edition includes a translated edition in Italian and was written with his newest co-author, Judi Nath. “The translation usually follows publication by at least a year,” Martini said. “The eighth edition just came out, so I don’t expect there will be a translated version until late next year. Translating 75,000 labels takes a lot of time.”

Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology (third edition) won its first Textbook Excellence Award (Texty) from TAA in 1996. It has since won two more, one in 1998 (fourth edition) and one in 2002 (fifth edition). Martini’s Human Anatomy textbook won a Texty in 1995 for the first edition. The fourth edition won a design award at the Bookbuilders West book show. “The award list stopped as of 2003 when my texts were transferred from Prentice Hall to Benjamin Cummings, because BC publishes other anatomy and physiology textbooks,” he said. “They are unwilling to submit my text or their others, probably for fears of perceived favoritism.”

As Martini’s accomplishments grow, he’s gained co-authors on the most time-consuming text projects. However, Martini, who credits part of his success to long office hours, admitted that gave him time to start new projects.

Martini has interesting – and at times, frustrating – experiences when the production of the North American editions, the standard English iteration of his texts, are distributed internationally. This tendency to spread the production process around the planet peaked around 2006; since then, the focus has shifted back to North America.

While he doesn’t know the financial complexities of that decision by the publisher, the shift has made his life easier in some ways. The time zone differences, for example, are reduced to a maximum of six hours. Every shift introduces new wrinkles, however, as the new production groups learn the layout conventions and standards for these texts, he said.

When his textbook’s production work is under way, Martini deals with many challenges. “Even over a mere six time zones, the major issues are communication and coordination,” he said. “With all of those time zones represented, somebody is almost always working and sending e-mails with questions or requests. No matter how much time you spend in the office, when you come back the next morning, there are e-mails expecting an immediate response.”

Telephone calls are another difficulty. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s received calls at 2 a.m. from someone on the East coast who was excited about something and wanted to talk to him right away that morning.

With work going on at stations all over the world, multiple iterations of the text and art are occurring at all production stages. It’s not easy to keep everyone “on the same page,” in terms of tracking and proofing, he said. At times, two books are in production simultaneously, which can bring further complications with artwork and text.

It’s not surprising that Martini said it was much simpler when the publisher handled all aspects of the textbook in-house, rather than distributing and outsourcing production work throughout the world. “It does save the publisher money, and it’s always good to have a solvent publisher,” Martini said. “From the author’s perspective, it is pretty much a ‘wash.’ It has shortened the production time, which gives more time for manuscript development, but it has made the paging process a real high-pressure situation.”

The benefits of International Editions (IEs) are tactical, financial, and personal. Martini pointed out the three different multi-national iterations in this process. He’s experienced all three, and their advantages and disadvantages.

First, almost all of Martini’s texts are available in softcover or hardcover IEs that are in English. Except for the binding and occasionally the pronunciation keys, these are indistinguishable from the North American edition. They are distributed throughout the English-speaking world. “It’s the IEs that cause problems re-entering the U.S. market,” he said. “These texts sell in the United Kingdom, European Union, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand,” he said. “The markets in these countries aren’t anywhere near as large as the North American market. In a discipline like biology, the local publishers cannot compete in terms of the illustrations and production quality.”

Second, the traditional routine for a translated edition involves the publisher selling the translation rights and splitting proceeds with the author. “The texts are translated and published by a separate country in a far-off location, and sometimes the author never sees the book or hears about how it is selling,” he said. “As far as I know, the Italian versions of my texts are the only ones now published under this kind of arrangement.”

Third, the new trend seems to be large multi-national publishing companies doing their own translations within their regional imprint, Martini said. “Publishers like Pearson have offices all over the planet,” he said. “They do the translation, print the text locally, and sell it at prices the local markets will bear. The sales appear on the author’s royalty statement, just like the English edition.”

Martini prefers to see translations fall under the third iteration category, because it increases the interest in, and awareness of, his textbooks inside the company. “In addition, there is tremendous growth in potential markets like China and India, if copyright laws are honored,” he said.

The revenue from translated editions is “very modest,” Martini said, compared to North American sales. “But it’s nice to see, and I enjoy getting e-mails from faculty in Egypt, Thailand, Sweden, Israel, Indonesia and Australia who are using my texts,” he said. “From a personal perspective, it’s also interesting to visit these countries and expand my perspective.”

Martini has taken the opportunity to travel to Italy, Australia, and New Zealand to visit university campuses. “These countries have different perspectives on the courses, they have different resources available, and their career paths are distinct from those of our students,” he said. “So, I have a lot of new ideas every time I return from one of those trips.”

A publisher decides which text to translate when there is more than one in a particular product line. “I suspect that mine were selected because my texts are very visual, with the text and art integrated throughout,” said Martini, who has worked with the same pair of medical illustrators for 25 years. They also work as the reviewers and collaborators on these projects. “The images are an international language that supports the concepts clearly, and struggling students in any language will look to the illustrations for help.”

Working with people across the world, he has no secret formula for making all of the pieces come together, except for “keeping my fingers crossed and answering all the e-mails ‘asap,’ ” he said.

Other advice he would pass along to authors working multi-nationally is to read contracts carefully. “See what it says about international editions and translated versions,” he said. “If you are negotiating a contract, pay a lot more attention to those clauses. The standard boilerplate contract usually gives a very low royalty for such things; it’s worth negotiating for a better deal."

It has been nearly 15 years since Martini left his teaching position at Maui Community College to work full time writing textbooks. At that point, Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology was in its second edition and manuscripts for both Human Anatomy and Essentials of Anatomy & Physiology were nearing completion. He wanted to keep his research going and to write occasional articles for popular magazines in sailing, a special interest of his.

Five other texts would follow: Foundations of Anatomy and Physiology, Structure and Function of the Human Body, The Human Body in Health and Disease, Anatomy and Physiology for Emergency Care, and Anatomy and Physiology.

“Something had to give,” said Martini, who has retreated from campus, except for an occasional summer course, to spend more time writing. “Things seem pretty well balanced now,” said Martini during an interview from his home on the Hawaiian Island of Maui.

Martini’s wife Kathleen co-authors many of his texts, and she acts as a clinical consultant for all of them. She has now retired full-time from medical practice. How Martini, who is 61 years old, “balances” so much in his life marvels some people. “The only way I’ve been able to do this successfully is to work long hours, while a particular project is under way,” he said. He’s usually up by 6 a.m. and in the office by 8 a.m. Six to seven days a week, he writes until he either gets hungry for dinner, generally at 8 p.m., or is distracted. “The pace gets particularly bad when we’re in a production,” he said.”But my goal is to work intensely on text projects for months at a time, and then go off and do something else that’s equally demanding but totally different – like sailing, field research, or travel.”

Martini’s busy career began in 1974 when he earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology, magna cum laude, from the University of New Hampshire, and a doctorate in comparative and functional anatomy from Cornell University. He moved to Hawaii in 1980 and taught science at Maui Community College. He spent summers between 1980 and 1992 at Shoals Marine Laboratory at Cornell as a resident core faculty member.

With a diverse audience of Caucasians, Asians, Hawaiians and other minorities in his Maui Community College classes, Martini saw how students struggled with existing textbooks. So he decided to write his own. Thus in 1989 was born Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology, which incorporated Martini’s informal lecture style. The goal, he said, was to give students “every possible assistance in organizing new information.” The pedagogical framework allowed students to test themselves to make sure they understood what they were reading before moving on to other ideas.

The second edition won an Association of Biological Illustrators award for artwork. It’s chocked full of illustrations that make it simple for students to, for example, read both about the muscular system or other systems and see them at the same time. This was possible because the author and illustrator were directly involved with the page layout.

Martini’s second textbook, Human Anatomy, co-authored with Professor Michael J. Timmons, was the “first attempt to combine the narrative of traditional textbooks with the visual component of an anatomy atlas,” Martini said. The trim size, 10 7/8 by 12 inches, allows much of the art to be life-size. The page that shows the intrinsic muscles of the hand, for instance, allows students to put their hands on top of it for easy comparison. Little wonder that Human Anatomy became the best-selling textbook in its field the first year of publication.

A third textbook, Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology, was co-authored with Ed Bartholomew, another biologist who lives and teaches on Maui. “Essentials has the most diverse audience,” Martini said. “It’s the course people will take for millions of reasons. It touches on everything enough to provide a foundation for other courses.”

Both Fundamentals and Essentials have a companion Applications Manual as a reference outside of class. The manual includes discussions on 200 or so relatively common disorders with cross-references to the text for background information. “It seems to help keep them interested,” Martini said. “Students in these courses care more about what goes wrong and how to fix it.”

Martini grew up in Pompton Plains, N.J., a woodsy suburban area with 5,000 people. Never a fan of winter, he loved spending time at the New Jersey shore. So when he had the opportunity to teach at Maui Community College in Hawaii, he jumped at it. “Hawaii has pretty close to the nicest climate on the planet,” Martini said. “It almost always has a breeze and is never too hot or too cold. I like being outdoors and going to the beach on Sundays.”

In addition to the great weather, Martini also appreciates Hawaii’s diversity. “It is a very different society in that it is multi-cultural. White Americans are the minority, only making up one-third of the population,” he said. It’s also a more relaxed culture, with no strict dress code. “The only time I wear a tie is when I go to a lecture on the mainland,” he said.

Martini does have plans to relax more in the future. “My plan is to scale back even more significantly once the new books are done, four to five years from now, depending, of course, on whether or not our retirement ‘savings’ ever regains their original value,” he said.

Three new first editions in the fields of anatomy and physiology are scheduled for publication in January 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively. “I am now putting in long hours working on the manuscripts for the first of these projects,” he said. “A second edition of Exploring Tropical Isles and Seas (1984) is under contract, but I have yet to find the spare time to get that on a fast track.”

In the meantime, he’s also done more outside research and written for more publications dealing with unusual deep sea fish. He’s been active with the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society, serving a three-year stint on the board. He’s a Western Regional Advisor to the board of the Authors Guild.

Martini’s son, P.K. is now 13 years old, and extremely active. The family enjoys spending time in Hawaii and in New Zealand, where their sailboat is located, and in the Pacific Northwest where his wife’s family lives.

Martini has considered 2008 to be a “light year” for work, because two of the biggest texts - Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology (eighth edition) and Human Anatomy (sixth edition) – were published in January. The family has spent much of the year traveling, giving P.K. a U.S. history lesson by touring the east coast. When they’re at home, they enjoy cultivating a variety of low-maintenance fruit – avocados, bananas, mangoes, papayas, lychees, lemons, limes, guaves, passion fruit and loquats – growing here and there around their yard.

— This article was originally written by Kim Pawlak in 1997, and updated by Kim Seidel in 2008.